


Reading "Your Ghost"

by yourlibrarian



Series: Reading Fan Vids [9]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Broken Families, Commentary, Fanvids, Gen, Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-04
Updated: 2016-05-04
Packaged: 2018-06-06 10:34:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6750427
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yourlibrarian/pseuds/yourlibrarian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some thoughts about parents as symbols and their children as legacies.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reading "Your Ghost"

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Your Ghost](https://archiveofourown.org/works/185672) by [charmax](https://archiveofourown.org/users/charmax/pseuds/charmax). 



> Originally posted June 30, 2010

As Charmax writes, "Your Ghost" is all about legacies in families, history repeating itself, sacrifice and love, and how Sam and Dean are John and Mary's children in various ways.

When I made the request to Charmax for the vid, I said the song had leaped out at me due to its line "It's the blaze across your nightgown, it's the phone's ring." And I thought that said exactly what we, the audience, knew of John and Mary in S1. She was a blazing symbol, he was an enigmatic voice on a phone. And even to Sam and Dean, their parents were as much symbols as people –- both due to their absence, and to how much each child had to construct a parent out of what was presented to them. How poignant was it in "Levee", after four seasons, when we see Sam's conception of his mother and she's a woman in a bloody nightgown?

So much about the song relates to communication and connection, or the lack thereof. So much of the SPN story is about the same –- the missed opportunities, the things that were hidden, the things that were shown and said. How fitting, for example, that in "Long Distance Call", that "John" should reappear by phone. However true those symbols of Mary and John were, even to their sons, things still go deep between parents and children, with a variety of connections. This is particularly true of the Winchesters who, thanks to so many hands at work, could never be "just" a family, and whose normal cycles of love and sacrifice get magnified to mythic proportions. 

All of this -- the distance, the mystery, the tragedy -- get woven into the vid. I think it also speaks to the essential unknowability between parents and children. Although they share the closest of bonds, in the end they are still strangers to one another –- people who, in some ways, they hardly know. And yet they become one another over time.

I love the way Charmax puts together particular lines and scenes, such as "you're not that tough" as Sam screams over John's body in the hospital. We can see him being reduced to a frightened child, however much he clashed with John. So too, his father is vulnerable (as we see in the following clips) as any man might be. 

I also like how these family ties come to a climax in the person of Adam –- a brother, a child, yet not really a Winchester except for the suffering. He had the normal life with a loving mother that Sam and Dean were deprived of, yet his death spoke to what Sam and Dean _did_ get out of their unenviable existence. What each of their parents did, or didn't do, speaks to their separate ends.


End file.
